Here’s one I didn’t see coming: Steven Seagal training Anderson Silva for his upcoming fight against Chael Sonnen…
If, like me, your first reaction is “Whuh?!”, here’s the video:
Seagal seems to be showing some aikido, mixed in with a bunch of other stuff. Some of it looks pretty cool, other techniques seem kind of hard to pull off. That said, if anybody can pull it off in the UFC Octagon, it’s Anderson Silva. He’s so incredibly unorthodox, he manages to land some really weird stuff on his opponents. So it wouldn’t surprise me if he looks outside of the standard MMA curriculum and into more traditional arts for inspiration.
However, I’m waiting for another video to come out where Anderson says it was just a joke Seagal and him wanted to play on Sonnen… So who knows?
If it is true, then it confirms something I said last year:
MMA has come full circle and is becoming a martial art in and of itself. Having discarded (and at first ridiculed) so much of the traditional arts they drew from in the beginning, it’s only normal that they come back to them once they realize they’re reinventing the wheel when they try to let their curriculum evolve and mature. That’s not a dig at MMA, on the contrary. I think it’s part of the natural cycle in fighting systems, martial arts and combat sports. It’s a bit ironic to see it happening but it’s going to be fun to see where the sport goes in the future.
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